A point of clarity and a quick summary of 26 weeks of floating, shape fitting, cycling and other bad metaphors that led up to it

Overly-enthusiastic move in and when this all began

I started grad school almost exactly half a year ago. Six months. Apparently that's how long it takes me to get to a point of clarity where the tasks I'm doing have stopped seeming so daunting and abstract, and all of the different components of my coursework, my reading, and my project development actually seem to align to represent something productive and tangible. 

Revisions for proposal drafts were due today and for the first time, I not only understood the statistical methods I am writing about, but I actually knew why I would be using them, and it wasn't just because they was successful or recommended in literature. This small victory, and my recent boost in organization and productivity have led me to think that maybe I should be documenting this journey.

This past week, I've finally gotten around to streamlining all my notes and readings to facilitates future writing and reviewing endeavors. It was easy to start different documents to write notes and convince myself that this system would be fine for the first week, and then the first month, and then the first semester. Spoilers: It was not fine for any of those. It made it difficult to organize notes by project or by theme when I had to review topics or write anything. Additionally, apparently using three different notebooks that have no actual theme or organization to write meeting notes, reminders, and tasks is not productive and results in items ultimately being forgotten. There's definitely a collection of dust bunnies building up under my bed right now, but I'm happy that the most tedious and rewarding part of my spring cleaning is done.

The past six months have kind of felt like a lazy river float. At no point did I feel like I was accomplishing anything grand or making incredible strides as a budding researcher. Yet, somehow the landscape surrounding me is completely new now and I've journeyed so far from where I started. What felt like six months of complaining about reading, late night GIS labs, and nine-to-five that pays hilariously below minimum wage, upon a closer (and more melodramatic) inspection have quite possibly been six months of the most rapid change and progression in my life. School used to be taking the knowledge acquired in class and shaping it to fit into the triangular and circular-shaped cutouts of assignments and exams that were proxies of my comprehension. Now the knowledge I acquire is mostly determined by me, and while there's still institutional cutouts that my knowledge needs to fit into, I get to choose my own shapes. If none of these shape analogies made any sense, the point I'm trying to make is that there's a sense of autonomy in this experience that has allowed me to delve deeper into the knowledge I acquire and think about topics I'm interested in with a more critical and engaged mindset. 

Coincidentally, in the past six months I've also been cycling more than ever in my life, and I've found cycling to be a pretty good metaphor for grad school. A self-propelled means of progress featuring plenty of headwinds, uphills, and overall suffering that ultimately generates a greater appreciation of personal capacity and self-worth. This metaphor probably really only stands if you have an intimate and weird appreciation for your bike. If this not is not applicable, I encourage you to mad libs the metaphor into something that holds meaning to you. Or perhaps you find neither end of this metaphor relevant, in which case I appreciate you reading my ramblings even though I make horrible stylistic choices in my prose. I expect that future posts will have more actual recaps of accomplishments and tasks and less existential musings and hyperbole. I aim to make this a weekly habit as a way to document this experience so that in the distant future when I try to recall what I did during my Master's, I will be able to look back on the experience as more than just two (hopefully) years of troubleshooting my coding problems on Stack Exchange. I hope to use this as a means of tracking my academic progress and learning how to word my research in a way that hopefully doesn't make people's eyes glaze over when I start talking. I look forward to sharing this journey with you.